Live Music Lighting 101 – Video Crew Lighting
I’m starting a new series of blog posts about most usual light setups that I see used while shooting live music. These schemes are going to go from the simplest to more complicated, and they are going to include some hand-drawn sketches. Be warned, if I knew how to draw, I probably wouldn’t have became a photographer.
(I’ve modified the theme a bit to suit reading text instead of showing pictures, so if you’re a returning visitor who sees something really wide and unreadable, please press ctrl+F5)
So to kick things off, we have the simplest lighting scenario you’ll ever find yourself in. The one where the concert in question is being recorded for a music dvd, tv broadcast or something like that.
The simple thing about it comes from the fact that camera crews don’t really like to change their exposures. They’ll kinda ‘anchor’ their exposure to the singer, so while the background lights might change from pitch-dark to stuff-exploding, they’ll move around that same exposure from the start of the story. First thing, they can’t play catch with the light because they’re making a continuous recording and that would show badly, and also there is a possibility that if the light changes, they have five cameras with five different exposure settings which is a PITA to edit afterwards. So to counter that, they’ll usually set the light up so the singer is lit the same all through the set.
The simplest way to accomplish that is to put spotlights (brown) under the roof (usually two) and keep them on the singer. On top of that, they’re going to put some fill lights (green) just above the stage to give it some color and get the rest of the band in the picture (I probably exaggerated a bit with -2EV). And to top it all off, you’ll probably have some back/rim lighting on the back of the stage up high (pink-ish). Now please bear in mind that this is a light designer’s bread and butter scheme for video recording, there will probably be some additional gimmicks included, but this is basically it.
Now that we understand the logic behind the light, let’s see how that relates to the photographer. First of all, keep your camera in manual exposure mode (always keep your camera in manual, but that’s another story…). Lock in your exposure for the singer and memorize it. It won’t change as long as you are there, so make sure you don’t have to waste time on finding it again. Also, since spotlights have very tight beams and loads of power, you’ll probably see a bit better exposures than you normally would. 1/250 2.0 800ASA kinda thing.
Even though the main exposure will be pretty good, the drop to the fill lights will be bigger than you’d like. In this scenario, it’s probably not the smartest thing in the world to combine the lead singer and the rest of the band in the same shot, other than the rest of the band serving as something to fill in the black. You should probably concentrate on getting the lead singer shots by the end of the first song at the latest, and than focus on the rest of the guys with the remaining time. The rest of the band will be lit in some other way, we’ll focus on that in future articles.
Now after you’ve got your happy-editor shots (tight portrait of the singer, horizontal singer, wide-angle stage, crowd…) you can get creative about using these vanilla lights.
The sketch above is a slight variation to the theme, when the stage isn’t rectangular, but has a “bridge” into the audience (also works for round stages and so on). Here you can notice that the singer is directly between the photographer and one of the spotlights. I heard it called “hiding” the light. This should give you a great rim effect, while your subject is still being lit with the other spotlight to the same basic exposure. That for me is the best thing about this light, no matter what kind of weird stuff happens around, the exposure is anchored in the middle. With most other kinds of light, when one goes up by 2EV, others go up by 1EV so there wouldn’t be too much fall-off. And if that doesn’t happen, you’ve got some great dramatic scenarios.
The last thing I’d like to mention is that music DVD recording is great for sales and great for promoting the band, which moves you as the photographer down the list of priorities. Please try not to get in the way of the video crew, because it won’t earn you a lot of brownie-points with the promoter.
Since this is the first post in the series, feel free to drop by the comment section and suggest some improvements to make it better.
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